UCI's 90+ Study tackles age-old question

Carmela LaRusso, 92, gardens, works as a receptionist, and reads up to two books a week. The Laguna Woods resident says she would not move to the senior community if she had to do it over again. "When I come home at 9 all the lights are off. Everyone is sleeping," she said of the nightlife. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Irene Lehman, 106, is a voracious reader and is on the library board of her assisted-living community. She recently tried to open a new Macy's credit card but the system kept defaulting her age to 10. The system apparantly is not set up for applicants with triple-digit ages. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Jane Whistler, 99, lives on her own in Laguna Woods and enjoys reading all day long. “I've always been sort of positive," she says of her reason for living so long. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Drs. Claudia Kawas, left, and Maria Corrada, professors at UC Irvine, are studying people 90 and older for clues about the secrets of longevity and dementia. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Director of the Brain Repository at UC Irvine, Wayne Poon, points to the hippocampus in a cross-sectioned brain. The brain belonged to a 101-year-old woman in the 90+ Study on aging who showed no signs of Alzheimer's disease. The hippocampus in a brain with Altzheimer's would have gaps around it showing shrinkage. MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Hints from the 90+

• People in the study who drink moderate amounts of alcohol or coffee are living longer than those who abstain.

• People who are overweight in their 80s are living longer than normal or underweight people.

• More than 40 percent of people 90 and older suffer from dementia.

• Nearly 40 percent of people with dementia who are 90 or older do not have significant Alzheimer's neuropathology in their brain.

• Nearly 40 percent of people without dementia have significant Alzheimer's pathology.

• If you lead an active, extroverted life and are something of a thrill seeker, you might be genetically primed to live into your 90s or longer. A variation of a gene involved in transmitting dopamine, a key component of the brain's reward and learning system, was found to be far more frequent among the 90+ crowd.

Ruthy was dusted with so much radiation in a World War II airplane factory that she glowed in the dark in her early 20s.

Jane smoked a pack of Pall Malls a day for 19 years.

And Irene was a pack-a-day Chesterfield gal.

They drink wine – or in Irene’s case, Scotch – before dinner. They say “no” to vitamins and “yes” to ice cream.

Yet they have made it to old age.

Actually, they didn’t just make it, they own it.

At 95, 99 and 106, they do yoga headstands, raise cactuses to sell on eBay and tell their broker to buy Twitter stock.

Clearly there are some things they did wrong. So what did they do right?

“Until now, presidents of that United States would send handwritten birthday cards to people who turned 100. That’s how rare it was,” says UCI neurologist Claudia Kawas.

“We’ve got a whole generation that has accomplished something that has never happened before in human history. They’re pioneers.

“I want to know how they did it. What are their secrets?”

That is the crux of UCI’s 90+ Study.

How does someone live not just a long life, but a long healthy life.

“We have added 27 years to our lives in the last century,” Kawas says. “But for many people, it’s a disabled life, not an active life.”

Kawas and epidemiologist Maria Corrada call it the 90+ Study because you have to be at least age 90 to get an invite.

Participants also are asked to make one promise: When you die, give us your brain.

So far, researchers have collected 210 brains. And more than 100 others have been promised, including the brains of Ruth, Jane and Irene.

The quest for the brains of “the oldest of the old,” began in 2003.

Kawas and Corrada had just come to UCI from Johns Hopkins University.

They heard about the Leisure World Cohort Study that a USC research team did in 1981 (primarily to study estrogen in women). The team had mailed 14-page questionnaires to 14,000 senior citizens who lived in Leisure World in Laguna Hills, asking about lifestyles, exercise habits, medical history, and diets.

Kawas and Corrada saw it as a potential gold mine and began tracking down people who had filled out the questionnaire. It took detective work – knocking on doors, cold-calling relatives.

At least 9,000 of those who filled out the questionnaires in ’81 had died. But when the doctors found someone who was at least 90, the person was invited to join the study.

Over the past decade, 1,600 people have enrolled, making it one of the largest studies of the 90-plus population in the world. Only 400 are left.

Participants are visited twice a year to give blood tests and perform feats such as counting backward from 100 by 3’s.

A third of the participants have since left what is now Laguna Woods, scattered to 33 states. One moved this summer to Rhode Island, where she is practicing psychotherapy at age 100, traveling to Manhattan to see clients.

A member of the 90+ Study team flies to the out-of-state seniors and records the visit on video.

“Our biggest challenge is that 95-year-olds are tired,” Kawas says. “They can’t see. They can’t hear. They get tired when they walk in the door. It’s a lot easier to work with five Alzheimer’s rats in a lab.”

In fact, a third of those in the study are in the throes of dementia. A solution to the dementia riddle would be the Holy Grail. It’s a race against the clock, Kawas says.

More than 4 million people in this country have dementia. The number of people in the dementia-ripe age range (90 and older) will quadruple by 2050, according to National Institute of Health projections.

And right now there is no consensus about what causes Alzheimer’s disease, the leading cause of dementia, let alone a cure or sure-fire prevention.

In a nutshell: One camp of researchers believes that a buildup of protein plaques in the brain causes Alzheimer’s. Another camp believes that protein tangles are to blame. And there are outlying researchers who don’t agree with either theory, saying the explanation is more complicated.

Kawas’ collection of brains lends credence to the latter conclusion. Forty percent of the people in the study who displayed no signs of dementia in life had post-mortem brains that were riddled with plaques and/or tangles.

Just last month, the UCI doctors won a $9.5 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to fund their study for another five years.

The grant will pay for MRIs and positron emission tomography scans on the brains of study participants who have no dementia so the doctors can track changes and then compare the images with the post-mortem brains.

So far, Kawas has lost 10 percent of the brains promised her because they weren’t handed over and chilled within 12 hours. The research team phones relatives to remind them that, when the time comes, they have a brain to deliver. Researchers mail refrigerator magnets to caretakers so that the phone number is right there.

“To get the brain on top of (the years of visits),” Kawas says. “It’s a gold mine.”

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